Cinnamon Roasted Almonds and Stripes

A while back, I found an awesome garage sale find, a Back To Basics Nut Roaster.

I had wanted to get one of these as kind of a joke for my aunt, who has a love for Cinnamon Roasted Almonds, (Whenever we'd go somewhere they were, she'd exclaim "I smell my nuts!"), but I never ended up buying one and they disappeared from the shelves.  So when I found this one brand new and never used for $3, I snatched it up!  So now I make a batch of almonds to take to family get-togethers, and sometimes just because!

I've found that they're best when I dry-roast them in the oven first.  Not only do they taste better, but the whole house smells awesome!  I just toss them onto a cookie sheet/baking dish and put them in a 350 F degree oven for about 20-25 min (I've found that the time will vary depending on ovens, so just keep an eye on them near the end and make sure they don't get to dark).

After they've roasted, I put them in the pan and add the cinnamon and sugar, and turn the burner on to medium high heat. Then I add the water and vanilla extract.  Then you just slowly stir and stir and stir until the liquid evaporates and the nuts are glazed.

This is the recipe that came with the pan, you can tweak it depending on how much sugar/cinnamon/vanilla you'd like(just don't use a ton of cinnamon, you'll end up with a goopy mess that looks like tar!).  You don't have to use a special pan, any heavy bottomed pan will work (like cast iron).  

1 C sugar

1/2 Tbsp ground cinnamon

2 C nuts

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

1/4 C water

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This week's nail challenge was stripes, and I just did a very simple design.  I used Wet'N'Wild Wild Shine Black Creme as a base color, then used N.Y.C. Matte topcoat on it.  I then painted a single stripe down the center of my nail with a shimmery dark cherry color polish, but that didn't really look nice to me.  So I got SinfulColors Let's Talk and painted over the red.  I loved the color combo, and also loved how pretty the shiny purple was against the matte black.

Tutorial Inspired - Week 25

This weeks nails are inspired by this tutorial by one of the first nail bloggers that I started following, +Wacky Laki.  I wanted to use my purples, SinfulColors Candy Coated and Let's Talk, and Color Club Pucci-Licious.  The design was easy enough to do on my left hand, although a bit time consuming.  My right hand though, I'm sad to say did not go as easily.  I used the pointy end of my orange sticks that came with the Ms. Manicure set I have to draw on the design.

This is the most color accurate picture, by the way.

Left Hand

Right Hand

By far my favorite nail look so far!

Week 24 - Violet

Not sure if I can call this violet, but it's the closest color I have at the moment.  

SinfulColors Let's Talk stamped with a Sally Hansen polish pen in a purple chrome color. 

Let's Talk is so hard to capture on camera!  It def leans more red that the blue it shows in my picture.  I've found this as the best color match. (Image originally found here )

Springtime!

I am in LOVE with SinfulColors new spring colors, especially Candy Coated!  It might be because it matches my eReader cover that I got for Valentine's Day.

I of course couldn't leave it alone, so I stamped with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Celeb City.

I used the same Mash plate as the fish scales for the grid stamp, and one of the plates that came in my Salon Express stamping set for the dragonflies.